Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

"Caribou?" Jim said.

"Maybe," Howie said.

"Out of season?" Jim said. "Howie, you astonish me. Anybody with you?"

Howie rolled his shoulders.

"Be a lot better if someone can corroborate your testimony, Howie. It can't do you any good if all you did was go on a joyride with nobody looking."

"Fuck," Howie said in a kind of furious mutter. "Martin was with me."

"Thought I recognized that old Yamaha," Jim said. "Anybody else?"

"We was just taking those caribou because we was hungry," Howie said, and then added, "we was taking the meat to the elders." He looked up, inspired. "Ask the aunties. They'll tell you."

There was a gloating kind of certainty in Howie's eyes that Jim didn't like. "Okay, I'll ask them. Where's Martin, Howie?"

"I don't know," Howie said. "We split up after we come down off the mountain."

"I see," Jim said. "Tell me, Howie, who have you pissed off lately?"

Howie stared at Jim, wounded. "Nobody," he said. "I didn't hurt nobody."

"Yeah," Jim said. "You need to think about this some, Howie. Somebody shot Mac Devlin in the back. I actually think you're telling me the truth, mostly because I saw you up there butchering out half the Gruening River caribou herd, so I don't think you did shoot him. I shudder to think what's going to happen to you when Ruthe Bauman finds out about your off-season slaughter, incidentally."

Howie looked aggrieved. Before he could say anything, Jim said, "But Mac wasn't supposed to be at Suulutaq. So far as I know, he didn't tell anyone he was going there, either. Which means that maybe whoever shot Mac didn't know they were shooting at Mac. Maybe whoever shot at Mac was thinking he was somebody else. Maybe whoever shot Mac was thinking he was shooting at somebody who was supposed to be there, whose job should have kept them there twenty-four seven, Monday to Monday."

Howie's head came up and he stared at Jim, his face sallow and starting to sweat.

Jim smiled at him. "Yeah, Howie," he said happily, "I'm thinking somebody tried to kill you and shot Mac Devlin by mistake." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Poor Mac."

"Poor Mac," Howie said mechanically, and seemed to revive. "What do you mean, poor Mac! What about me?"

"What about you? Lucky you, I'd say." Jim knotted his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair to look at the ceiling. "Well. Unless they try again, of course."

"Unless they try again?" Howie said.

"Yeah, you know," Jim said, adding helpfully, "to kill you." He shook his head. "Seemed like a pretty serious effort to me. In my experience, anybody who's that determined is likely to give it another shot. So to speak." He stood and came around the desk. "Here, let me get that off you so you can get out of here."

"Wait," Howie said. "Wait, Jim, wait!" He hopped the chair backward, trying to get out of range of the handcuff key.

"Howie, come on now. You've got to sit still or I'll never get that cuff off you."

"I got something to tell you! Something you don't know about Louis!"

"Louis's dead, Howie," Jim said, grabbing him before he could hop any farther. He jammed the key in the cuff and twisted. The cuff came free but before he could stop him Howie slammed the cuff back around the arm of the chair and locked it, holding his hand over it so Jim couldn't get at it again.

"Howie," Jim said, starting to get a little irritated, "I've had a long couple of days. Knock it off."

"The aunties hired his killing, Jim! They hired it done!"

Jim bagged the rifle and took it out to the Niniltna airstrip, where he was lucky enough to catch George Perry on a flight to Anchorage. He gave him the rifle for delivery to the crime lab.

Howie he locked up, and told Maggie no one was to talk to Howie except him. "Okay, boss," she said.

Maggie Montgomery's chief qualification for the job of dispatcher/ telephone answerer/clerk was her determined incuriosity. "My plan is to leave the job at the office when I go home every day," she'd told him during the interview, and he'd hired her on the spot. She might try to tell him what to do on occasion-as in attempting to discourage him from finding Louis Deem's killer last year-but that he could live with. Discretion in a cop shop was a rare and precious commodity, especially in a small town, and Jim was willing to put up with any amount of backtalk in private so long as he got a smiling, uncomplaining, and stolidly uncommunicative face in public. So far, Maggie, an Outsider who had married a Moonin she met on a fish processor in the Bering Sea, was holding up very well, both as his chief cook and bottle washer and as a Park rat. She might just stick.

He went down to the Riverside Cafe and got a hamburger and french fries to go and delivered it back to Howie. Howie actually thanked him. Jim wanted to open the door of the cell and beat him to death, and something in Jim's eyes must have indicated this because Howie dropped his eyes and became very, very still.

Jim went back to his office and closed the door, and then, for several minutes, he just stood there in the middle of the room, hands dangling uselessly at his sides. For the life of him he couldn't figure out what to do next.

He'd always figured Howie was the most likely suspect, but all this time he had thought Bernie had hired it done directly.

The year before, Bernie Koslowski's wife and son had been murdered in their own home. General consensus was that the killings had been committed by Park bad actor Louis Deem, whom it was supposed Enid and Fitz Koslowski had caught in the act of burglarizing the cabinet full of gold nuggets in the living room.

Shortly thereafter, Louis Deem had been shot and killed on the road to the Step. Bernie was the obvious suspect, so Jim had looked hard at Bernie, to the general disapprobration and not a little vocal abuse of the entire Park. The subsequent investigation had cleared Bernie of all suspicion of the crime.

Not least because his alibi was Sergeant Jim Chopin, with whom he'd been visiting over a latte at the Riverside Cafe at the time of the murder, in full view of cafe owner Laurel Meganack, Old Sam Dementieff, and half a dozen other Park rats, all with excellent memories.

"What is it you want me to do, Bernie?"

"Your job."

Well, he'd done his job. He'd maintained the peace and the public order.

One of the principal core values of the Alaska State Troopers was loyalty, first to the state of Alaska, then to the highest ideals of law enforcement, and, in third place, to the truth, although as stated "the truth, regardless of outcome."

Jim had been thinking a lot about that particular core value lately. The truth was he liked working in law enforcement. The truth was he didn't like the messes people got themselves into and he liked using what ability he had to step in and straighten those messes out. The truth was he was good at his job, and he knew it.

He'd opened the Alaska State Troopers' forty-fourth post in Niniltna going on three years ago, and if he had been a Park fixture before, by now he was a full-fledged Park rat. He was well aware of the dangers of being so dug in. A cop was always going to be a little bit on the outside looking in, or he should be if he was going to function effectively. If he was regarded as a member of his community, then it followed that other members in that community might feel comfortable enough with his presence to approach him with suggestions they wouldn't have dared to propose to the cop perceived to be Other.

"What is it you want me to do, Bernie?"

"Your job."

He had not allowed himself any preconceptions as to the identity of the killer of Louis Deem. He had conducted a by-the-book investigation into his death, reconstructing Deem's movements as minutely as was possible in an area as vast and as unpopulated as the Park, extensively interviewing the people closest to Louis as well as all the people who had last seen him alive, and, as near as he was able, keeping his prior knowledge of the character of the dead man from coloring his work.